


Hallway Light

by Snickfic



Category: Captain Marvel (2019)
Genre: Fluffy Creepiness?, Gen, General Situational Creepitude, Hala (Marvel), Pre-Captain Marvel (2019), creepy fluff?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-14
Updated: 2019-08-14
Packaged: 2020-08-19 16:44:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20213005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snickfic/pseuds/Snickfic
Summary: “Here,” Yon-Rogg says, stopping before a door with a pointed, high-peaked frame above it. In the glyphs Vers has had to relearn from scratch, she reads,Gymnasium.“I wasatthe gym,” Vers says.Yon-Rogg thumbs the door open. “This one’s better.”





	Hallway Light

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lirin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lirin/gifts).

> Hope you enjoy, Lirin!
> 
> Title and inspiration from "Light in the Hallway" by Pentatonix. Hala's vertical organizational structure and the history of Yon-Rogg's gym both inspired by discussion in _Marvel's Captain Marvel: The Art of the Movie._

This time when Vers rounds the turn of the track, there’s a figure in the doorway. Even in the half-light, she knows him by build and posture alone: Yon-Rogg. She slows to a stop as she reaches him, sweeping sweat from her forehead. Her hair’s tied up; the free ends of it itch against her neck. 

She might be in trouble. “Hey,” she says, very casual: show no weakness. Alternatively: piss off Yon-Rogg. A win-win. “Didn’t expect to see you around here so late.”

“Or I you,” Yon-Rogg said, eyeing her thoughtfully. Underneath his jacket, he’s dressed in exercise robes just like hers. “I was alerted you were down here—you were unnerving the janitor.”

“Oh,” Vers says, chagrined. She didn’t even notice a janitor. Too caught up in her own head, which is definitely what Yon-Rogg is about to point out. Focus, Vers. Pay attention.

Except he doesn’t. What he says is, “I’d like to show you something.” He turns; she follows him out of the gym. She holds her silence, dutifully chastised, until he takes them to an elevator she’s never used before. Inside, he punches a floor she’s never been to before: not a floor in the tower, surely. _Sublevel Six._

“Where are we going?” Vers says.

“Out,” Yon-Rogg says. “The undercity.”

Hala is built of layers, Vers learned when she woke up here. Starforce’s tower is at the top, the defensive layer: the protection between Hala and the stars. The undercity is at the very bottom. She’s never had any reason to go there, though. It’s not like she grew up here. There’s no one waiting for her down below.

There’s no one anywhere—not even in her dreams.

The elevator lets them out in a substation. Down a yellow-lit hallway and some stairs, they come to a train station. A few Kree hang about, leaning on pillars, hunched on benches. A stylized mural of a Skrull attack takes up the entire wall across the tracks. 

The silence makes Vers itch. “So when you say _something_,” she begins.

Yon-Rogg smiles. “Do I need to remind you again about patience?”

“Please don’t,” Vers groans. 

Yon-Rogg chuckles and folds his hands behind him. “I grew up in the undercity,” he said.

That, Vers didn’t know. Minn-Erva, Korath-Thak, Bron-Char all grew up in the middle layers, sublevel two or three: levels that still caught sight of the sun. Korath-Thak is a general’s son. Minn-Erva’s mother heads a weapons research division. “What was it like?”

“What’s any childhood like?” he asks, but the words are fond. It’s obvious his memories are good ones.

Vers envies him with a sudden, bitter envy. She swallows it down and copies his pose: hands folded behind her. At ease, though Starforce doesn’t bother much with ceremony. They’re above it. _Literally_, Minn-Erva said with a smirk, while Korath-Thak the general’s son scowled in the background.

Their train car is nearly empty. It glides along the track silently, almost eerily. They get out two stops later, take another elevator, walk out onto a street bright with signs lit in pink and yellow and green: the undercity. Even at this hour, there are people, voices, smells. Vers likes it at once. “This far below the surface, they’re less bound by the movements of the sun,” Yon-Rogg says. He nods towards a shopfront, where a man stands in a window. “We’ll stop there for hashmin after.” From the window waft the mingled scents of min-spice and grease.

“After what?”

“Shhh,” Yon-Rogg says, so damn pleased with himself. He’s relaxed, here, shoulders loose, the lines of his mouth softened in a way Vers didn’t think it was capable of. She finds herself liking him better, here in the underside of the world.

“Here,” Yon-Rogg says, stopping before a door with a pointed, high-peaked frame above it. In the glyphs Vers has had to relearn from scratch, she reads, _Gymnasium_. 

“I was _at_ the gym,” Vers says.

Yon-Rogg thumbs the door open. “This one’s better.”

Better than Starforce’s? Vers lifts her eyebrows sky-high, keeps her mouth shut, and follows him in. The place is far bigger than it looked from the outside. The walls open to ceilings far above her head, and a warm, yellow glow washes everything. Yon-Rogg nods to the woman at the desk as they pass and leads Vers finally to a long, narrow room floored with sparring mats. “I’ve trained here since I was a boy,” Yon-Rogg says. His eyes sweep to the ceiling. “I first learned to throw a punch here. Block a strike, break a hold. Starforce made me what I am today, but here is where it began.” He takes off his jacket and turns to her a smile that’s almost boyish, his eyes bright. “Now, shall we?”

He takes her down six times in a row, handily, effortlessly. “You’re gonna beat the restlessness out of me, huh?” she says, shoving to her feet once again.

“If you prefer to see it that way,” he says, amused.

It’s an hour before she cries mercy. She was sweaty before; she’s drenched now. If she bruised, she’d be purple, so it’s a good thing she doesn’t: an oddity of people on her lost planet, she was told. Something in the soil.

True to Yon-Rogg’s promise, they stop by the hashmin shop on the way back, and they take their food to an empty bench just outside it. The hash bread is heavy and still hot; the vegetables inside, sharp with min-spice, make Carol’s mouth water. An hour on the track and another hour with Yon-Rogg works up a hell of an appetite, it turns out. And when she’s down to crumbs, she finds she’s sleepy: her belly full, her thoughts at last mostly still. “This was great,” she says. “Thank you.”

Yon-Rogg looks her hard in the face, his gaze sober. “We can come down anytime. If your dreams torment you, or you can’t sleep—there’s never a bad time to put in a little extra training.”

“I appreciate that,” Vers says, choking up a little and hating it. Everyone’s always after her about control; why can’t she control this helpless, small feeling?

Yon-Rogg reaches across the table and squeezes her wrist. “This is your home now, Vers. This is where you will become who you were meant to be, and I want it to _feel_ like your home. I will do whatever is in my power to make it so.”

“Me, too,” Vers says. That planet behind her, Skrull-ravaged, so foreign to her it feels like the memories were pulled out of her like weeds—there’s nothing there for her. He’s right. Hala is her home now. Starforce is her people. “I’ll work on it, too. And I’m going to take you up on that offer, you know.”

“I look forward to it,” he says warmly, like he means it.

[end]


End file.
